IBM’s grand plan to sell itself by the slice continues.
On January 21, 2022, IBM said it will hand health care data and analytics assets from its Watson Health business to private equity firm Francisco Partners in a deal reportedly worth around $1 billion.
Last November saw the high-profile spinoff of its global services division to form Kyndryl, now valued at around $3.7 billion, or a little over 3% of Big Blue’s market capitalization, and in 2019 it sold its Watson Marketing business, now rebranded Acoustic, to another private equity firm. But the strategy goes back further than that: in 2014 it sold its x86-based server business to Lenovo, and a decade before that its iconic PC business went to the same buyer.
It’s a strange moment to be winding down health care activities, when cloud infrastructure rivals Oracle and Microsoft are going all-in. In December 2021, Microsoft won regulatory …